A company by the name of Village Instruments has become the centre of attention for many folks as of last week when CEO, Hubert Chen wrote an open letter to Facebook in efforts to guage Mac customer interest in an external PCI-E graphics card enclosure that would connect via the Thunderbolt IO interconnect.

His promise was that if there were 50 or more people to have commented in return showing interest in a product like this, the company would begin developing the device. It's not surprising to find out that a little over a week later, there wasn't only 50 positive comments made toward the idea, but now well into the hundreds.

Chen has since confirmed development would begin soon. We can only assume at this point that it will be at least partially similar in construction to Village Instruments' existing ViDock product (pictured), although it is limited to the ExpressCard interface which is only capable of around 2.5Gb/s. Thunderbolt should prove to be much more suitable for a device like this with its 10Gb/s of bandwidth on tap.